Masaad Boulos: The tycoon navigating Trump’s Middle East chessboard

During the Lebanese parliamentary elections of 2009, few had heard of Masaad Boulos, a relatively unknown Greek Orthodox tycoon was running on a Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) ticket headed by Michel Aoun.

His affiliation to Aon ran through his father-in-law, who was one of FPM founders in the 1990s and Bolos had served as its liaison in Nigeria, where he made his fortune.

Masaad Bolos lost those elections and in 2012, parted ways with the FPM over disagreement with Aoun’s son-in-law and chosen successor Gibran Bassil. Ten years later, his son would marry Tiffany, the fourth child of then-former president Donald Trump, throwing him into the international spotlight.

Trump would rely on Masaad during his campaign to win over Arab Americans and recently, appointed him senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs.

Bolos will now be part of the inner circle of the incoming presidency. How then will this affect Trump’s policy towards Lebanon and the broader Middle East?

After parting ways with Bassil, Bolos teamed up with an old friend named Suleiman Frangieh, scion of a leading Maronite political family whose grandfather and namesake had been president of Lebanon in the 1970s.

A former minister and MP, Frangieh was an ally of Hezbollah. In 2024, while Bolos was campaigning for Donald Trump in the US, Frangieh was campaigning to become president in Lebanon.

If Bolos sticks to his old friends, then he can certainly try and talk Trump into accepting Frangieh as president of Lebanon, filling a vacuum that has lasted since Michel Aoun’s term expired in October 2022.

A more difficult task, however, will be on how to pull Lebanon back together after the latest Israeli war that demolished its entire south and the southern suburb of Beirut. Even before the war Lebanon had been suffering from chronic electricity problems, a decaying economy, hyperinflation, brain drain, and a crippling banking crisis.

The 60-day ceasefire brokered by the outgoing Biden Administration in November calls for full implementation of UNSCR 1701, pushing Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon while dismantling its military infrastructure. It expires right with the beginning of Trump’s term on 20 January 2025.

Embedded in UNSCR 1701 is an earlier UN resolution numbered 1559, which calls for the disarming of all non-state actors (in reference to Hezbollah) and monopolising arms in the hands of the Lebanese Army.

Despite being severely weakened by the latest war, Hezbollah would not allow it, and should Trump abide by full implementation of UNSCRs 1701 and 1559, then a new war could be on the anvil. The president-elect does not want a new war in the region, however, having sharply criticised Joe Biden for allowing the Gaza and Lebanon wars to happen.

As Lebanon teeters on the edge of renewal or deeper conflict, Boulos’ influence could shape US policy in a region rife with competing loyalties and fragile alliances. Whether Boulos uses his position to stabilise Lebanon or navigate the broader Middle East’s fault lines will reveal how much weight personal connections carry in the high-stakes realm of international diplomacy.

— Sami Moubayed is a historian and former Carnegie scholar. He is also author of the best-seller Under the Black Flag: At the frontier of the New Jihad.